Language, Thought, and Information Processing
Patricia Smith Churchland · Noûs · 1980
There is no doubt that some of the information-bearing states of the central nervous system are not a species of sentential attitude; that is, they are not describable in terms of the person's being in a certain functional state whose structure and elements are isomorphic to the structure and elements of sentences.1 Obviously, for example, the results of information processing in the retina cannot be described as the person's believing that p, or thinking that p, or thinking that he sees an x, or anything of that sort. At the other extreme, there is also no doubt that some intelligent creatures talk, and indeed, sometimes talk silently to themselves. Between the obviously non-linguistic information processing and the obviously linguistic behaviour, there appears to be much of a cognitive sort going on in the brain-mind in virtue of which the intelligent behaviour is intelligent. The nature and form of these intermediate processes are the source of profound perplexity and the cause of much speculation. As yet, the perplexity and speculation have not sired anything that could justly be called a theory of information processing in intelligent beings, though the search for information-processing models appears to be providing an impressive bounty of inspired guesses concerning at least some parts of what must be an awesome organization. In this paper I mean to focus on a very general and fundamental question concerning the character of information-processing models for humans; to what extent-how far down-can the processing be described in terms of operations amongst sentential attitudes such as beliefs, desires, thoughts, and so on? My answer is that we had best abandon the sentential attitude for all but rather superfi-